Nothing is impossible

New York, 1961. It’s early morning and a yellow taxi stops on an empty Fifth Avenue at the luxury jewellery shop Tiffany’s. An elegant young lady in a beautiful ‘little black dress’ by Hubert de Givenchy, with dark sunglasses and her brown hair in a French twist, totters on her heels towards the window. Dreaming, she admires the beautiful jewellery. She conjures a croissant and a coffee from a white paper bag. And thus begins the famous opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a romantic comedy by Blake Edwards, based on a novel by Truman Capote, in which Audrey Hepburn’s elegant and iconic appearance continues to capture the imagination even today. Could Audrey Hepburn have imagined in 1944, while languishing in the Dutch famine that plagued occupied Holland, that 17 years later she would star in a Hollywood blockbuster? I suspect not. And perhaps that’s why she would have said, Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I'm possible. A fine play on words by an iconic lady, who remains a role model for many today for her elegance, good taste and philanthropic commitment.

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JULES VERNE AND THE LIGHT BULB

Over the past 200 years, science has made huge leaps forward that many considered impossible. As a child, like many, I loved Jules Verne’s books. Around the World in 80 Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon... Each title fired my imagination as a little boy. The technical challenges Verne wrote about were still considered impossible in his time. Today, they are standard technology: Travel around the world in 80 days? In 1992, Concorde flew around the earth in a record time of 33 hours. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea? Submarines have been in use since the early 1900s. Travelling to the moon? Apollo 11 landed on the moon on 24 July 1969... And what does the future bring? Nuclear fusion, time travel, becoming invisible... all still science fiction today, just as Jules Verne's books once were.

We have, along with many experts, misjudged what was possible in the past. Some examples...150 years ago, the idea of the light bulb was laughed off by many experts. In 1878, Thomas Edison announced that he was developing an incandescent lamp which had an immediate effect on the price of gas (public lighting in big cities was done by gaslight). A British parliamentary committee set up an enquiry and, after careful consideration, concluded: “Good enough for our transatlantic friends... but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men”.

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“Flight by machines heavier than air is impractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible,” said physicist and Head of the US Naval Observatory, Simon Newcomb, in 1902. A year later, the Wright brothers proved otherwise with the first flight of their glider. Even two years after the Wright brothers had covered 38 kilometres with their Flyer 3, William H. Pickering, Director at Harvard College Observatory, said, “It is clear that with our present devices there is no hope of aircraft competing for racing speed with either our locomotives or automobiles”.

And what are we to make of this statement by great mathematical genius, John von Neumann, in 1949 when he announced the end of further progress in computer technology: “It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology”. Fortunately, he was savvy enough to immediately add although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years”.

THREE NECESSARY ELEMENTS TO TURN THE IMPOSSIBLE INTO THE POSSIBLE

“It always seems impossible until it’s done, said Nelson Mandela. For instance, a man can run 100 metres in 9.58 seconds, eat 103 hamburgers in eight minutes and not blink for one hour, 17 minutes and three seconds. These are feats that are impossible for you and me today but mankind has managed to achieve them. And why do Jamaican Usain Bolt, American Joey Chestnut and American Julio Jaime respectively succeed in this?

Or take Japanese Akira Haraguchi. This Tokyo resident is the world record holder in memorising and reciting decimal places of the number pi. You and I know that pi is 3.14 and some may go as far as 1592 after that and inform us that pi is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. Pi is an irrational number, meaning it has an infinite number of decimals with no repetitive parts. And that is why it is a challenge for many to memorise as many decimal places as possible. At 9 am on 3 October 2006, Akira started reciting decimal digits of the number pi. The next day at 1 am, after 16 hours of recitation, he had recited 100,000 digits in the correct order. He further improved this record on pi day 2015 when he was able to recite 111,701 decimal digits. In an interview, Akira Haraguchi says of his fascination with pi: “To me, reciting pi’s digits has the same meaning as chanting the Buddhist mantra and meditating. I’m trying to do more these days, making it a daily goal to recite more than 25,000 digits, which takes me about three hours.”

Here, Akira immediately raises two of the three points I think are crucial if you want to make the impossible the possible:

  1. Purpose: you can only achieve something if you are interested in the topic and intrinsically motivated. For Akira, it’s not just memorising numbers, but his efforts have a religious-philosophical meaning
  2. Practice: achievements don’t come overnight. You achieve them only after a lot of practice. Akira aims to train for three hours every day
  3. Persistence: mastery is achieved only when you have found a method of continuous improvement for yourself. You will read later how Akira achieves this

THE THREE STEPS TO PURPOSE AND COMMITMENT

In the early 1980s, American educational psychologist, Benjamin Bloom, launched a study to answer the question: what can we discover in the childhood of successful individuals that explains why they are so extremely good at what they do? To do this, Bloom interviewed 120 people in six fields – Olympic swimmers, tennis champions, concert pianists, mathematicians, neurologists and sculptors looking for common patterns in their childhood. Based on his analysis, he defined three stages that each ‘expert’ went through:

  • Phase 1: Starting. In this phase, children develop an interest in a particular domain. They play, explore, and discover... their interest is still largely external: they work for attention, applause and approval, mainly from their parents
  • Phase 2: Developing. Now things get serious. After playing in the first phase, they now practice regularly. As they get better at what they do, they develop internal motivation by gaining respect and approval from peers, parents and teachers. The children also begin to self-identify as ‘swimmer’, ‘pianist’ or ‘scientist’...
  • Phase 3: Deepening. Youngsters get an internal drive to become the best in their field and they are willing to sacrifice a lot for this. They seek out the best coaches and schools and practise several hours a day

Bloom nicely describes a process we are all familiar with. We find something interesting, start delving into it and, before we know it, it is an out-of-control hobby that has taken up the whole attic room or garage...

THE 10,000-HOUR RULE

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In his bestseller, Outliers – The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell describes the rule of 10,000 hours of practice using some examples. The Beatles trek to Hamburg five times between 1960 and 1962 where they perform for more than 270 nights. Gladwell estimates that they performed at least 1,200 times before their big breakthrough. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, spent evenings and weekends programming in the computer lab at the University of Washington in the early 1970s... The point Gladwell wants to make then is that John Lennon, Paul McCarthy and Bill Gates are undoubtedly talented at their craft, but without persistent practice, you won’t get anywhere.

Gladwell took his cue from a 1993 study by Swede Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University. He studied several musicians at the Berlin Academy of Music to find out why some violinists were better than others. The professors at the academy divided the students into two groups – the best violinists and the good violinists. Ericsson collected a lot of biographical data and was able to conclude that, at 18, the best violinists had practised, on average, 7,410 hours independently, the good violinists only achieved an average of 5,301 hours. Ericsson did a similar study on ballet dancers and came to the same result – to achieve top performances, you have to practise for thousands of hours.

KEEP ON GOING

Nothing is impossible, as long as you are motivated enough in what you want to achieve. And after that, you need to sink your teeth firmly into your goal and practice. And finally, you must also demonstrate perseverance and continuous improvement.

The latter is sometimes described as deliberate practice. Not only is the number of hours you practise important importantly, but also how you practise and what specific skills you learn to take the next step in your mastery. In chess, for example, this could be specific memory training, in sports, or specific breathing techniques.

Three elements are crucial in deliberate practice:

  1. Specific: Deliberate practice means you break down your performance into small pieces, you identify your weaknesses, for these weaknesses, you determine specific workouts and you evaluate progress
  2. Concentration: during practice, you are present with your full attention. Take running for example an average athlete listens to some music or thinks about everything but his running technique while running. With deliberate practice, you just start concentrating on a particular piece of your running technique
  3. Feedback: you provide feedback. This can be done, for example, by keeping data or a coach guiding you during your performance

This example from Aubrey Daniels on basketball sums up perfectly what deliberate practice means: “Player A shoots 200 practice shots, Player B shoots 50. Player B retrieves his shots, dribbles leisurely and takes several breaks to talk to friends. Player A has a colleague who retrieves the ball after each attempt. The colleague keeps a record of shots made. If the shot is missed the colleague records whether the miss was short, long, left or right and the shooter reviews the results after every 10 minutes of practice. To characterize their hour of practice as equal would hardly be accurate. Assuming this is typical of their practice routine and they are equally skilled at the start, which would you predict would be the better shooter after only 100 hours of practice?”

Closing with our Japanese friend Akira Haraguchi “who ate all the pi”. A basic principle of mnemonic or memory art is to give structure to data that has no structure so that you can remember it more easily. For example, for the number pi, you can create texts where the number of letters in each word indicates the consecutive digits of pi. As in this example by English scientist James Jeans: “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.”

Akira Haraguchi developed his language by assigning Japanese kana alphabet symbols to digits.

  • 0 => can be replaced by o, ra, ri, ru, re, ro, wo, on or oh
  • 1 => can be replaced by a, i, u, e, hi, bi, pi, an, ah, hy, hyan, bya or byan
  • And so on

In this way, Akira translates the 111,701 decimal places together into 800 stories about people, animals and plants. For example, the first 50 digits of the number pi are this story: Well, I, that fragile being who left my hometown to find peace of mind, is going to die in the dark corners; it’s easy to die, but I stay positive.” And so Akira developed and improved his memory training method. “I have managed to develop a certain methodology for improving cognitive abilities, so I have been trying to contribute to society by introducing something like the “Haraguchi method” of recovering from dementia”.